The Health and Human Services inspector general has been busy. Two new audits reveal failures in ObamaCare on an astounding scale. There are unresolved discrepancies, rules violations and technology problems that expose taxpayers to unknown costs. They bit off more than they could chew.

The HHS inspector general found 2.9 million “inconsistencies” in applications that were submitted to the federal Health Care.gov exchange during the first five months of open enrollment. “Inconsistencies” refers to things like Social Security numbers that don’t match government data, income data, family size, and citizenship that don’t check out. Around 1.3 million of the problems dealt with citizenship. An additional million involved declared income.

The inspector general was unable to resolve these “discrepancies” because the ObamaCare “eligibility was not fully operational.” In other words, who knows if the applicants were eligible to receive ObamaCare at all? Or if they are eligible are they getting the right subsidies? Are they even citizens?

Only 6 million had filled out applications by the end of February, and only 2.6 million had enrolled. Of the 300,000 problems that HHS was capable of resolving, it had only managed to clear up for just 10,000.

Eleven states ran exchanges, and had problems with 34% of the applications they had received — a total of 422,772 problems. They didn’t say if they had resolved any. The federal exchange and two state exchanges didn’t have adequate internal controls to make sure taxpayers were protected from fraud and abuse.

To top that all off, the government hasn’t been reconciling its enrollment numbers with insurance companies to account for dropouts and cancellations. Who knows how many are actually enrolled, or how many people believe they are enrolled and are not? And how many have tried to get coverage to which they are not entitled?

In the private sector, there would be criminal charges and a lot of self-important people would be heading to jail.

The president has changed the law, changed due dates, changed requirement and delayed one thing and another. How that plays out I don’t know. It’s probably one of those —”after the election” things he is so fond of.

If I understand correctly, he has promised the insurance companies that the government would (taxpayers would) bail them out if they came up short. What that means I don’t know.

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The Democrats aim in creating this monstrosity was dishonest. They wanted to make people dependent on big government, and eventually ease us into single-payer, which would kill a lot of people and bankrupt the country. They don’t and didn’t understand insurance, and tried to cram in all sorts of goodies to please people, while not including the essentials. I really sympathize with you for the huge cost increase. We need to get rid of it entirely and turn back to the free market. Enter “Oklahoma Surgical Center” in the search function just over Bob Hope’s head in the sidebar.